Multidisciplinary research teams from Stanford University and HPI work on diverse topics concerned with Design Thinking, its process, method, interaction patterns and tools in order to investigate the phenomena of innovation.

Measuring the Impact of Design Thinking on Software Development Processes and Products

PI: Matthias Uflacker

Abstract

A seamless integration of Design Thinking, Scrum and Lean Start-Up activities into one agile software development process is still subject to research. Furthermore, while Scrum as well as Lean Start-Up over metrics to evaluate their performance, it is still unclear how to empirically measure the impact of Design Thinking. Towards these two gaps, this project aims to develop a framework that seamlessly integrates Design Thinking, Scrum and Lean Start-Up activities for agile software development teams and allows to measures the impact of Design Thinking on the development process and the final product. Our framework will build upon prior work and be composed of a conceptual process model based on best practices for software development and a set of metrics to investigate how Design Thinking affects the software development process and the final product. We will adopt the Delphi Technique to evaluate this framework with software companies of different sizes. This technique is a widely used and accepted method to validate models through experience of the participants. Our findings will provide a deeper understanding of how to offer a comprehensive support for agile software teams throughout the whole development process and valuable insights into how to create more innovative software-products.